If you're looking to find engaged employees, social media is great news! Social media enables employers to post employment opportunities while at the same time positioning their overall brand. Some companies have even begun eschewing the former for the latter, focusing their hiring-related social media campaigns more on the company's brand and culture — what they do and who they are — than on highlighting individual jobs.
Why? Because these employers understand that the key to hiring engaged employees is finding people who are a good fit for the firm's culture, more so than for a particular post.
Back in the olden days — you know, 15 or 20 years ago — anyone seeking employment would look first to the local newspaper's Help Wanted section. These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find a job this way. What was once a major section of every daily newspaper, particularly on Sundays, is now a scant few pages (if any).
These days, the lion's share of job searches take place online, either on dedicated job-search sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder or, perhaps more commonly, on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube.
If you're looking for new hires, a great first stop is LinkedIn. With more than 200 million users in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, LinkedIn is far and away the largest professional networking site.
Many corporate recruiters, both internal and external, use LinkedIn to identify passive job candidates (people who aren't searching for a job per se, but who may be open to changing positions given the right set of circumstances).
For their part, job seekers use LinkedIn to identify firms that may be hiring, and to keep their own profiles and résumés up to date in case an employer finds them. Indeed, for many on LinkedIn and other forms of social media, the focus has shifted from applicants finding new employers to employers discovering potential recruits!